St Saviour's Court is on the site of the St Saviour's church which was taken down a year or so after we first came to the neighbourhood in 1994. The building of St Saviour's court took a couple of years and was completed some 20 years ago. The war memorial was moved from the side of the church to the front of the courtyard of the new development. The old vicarage remains, now a private house. St Saviour's was the parish church.
Another, smaller church was further down, on the opposite side of the Alexandra Park Road, road, just before the T junction with Albert Rd. It had a church hall which we used for community activities and meetings. That may have been a Unitarian church, but my memory often plays tricks on me, so please correct me if you know. There was much opposition to that development because the hall was a precious local amenity. The developer was required to allow continued access to the hall when planning permission was granted. So they let the hall fall into disrepair and ruin, then cleared the site and built what is now a private nursery.
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Yes 268 AP Road was the Vicarage, the current owners are friends and confirmed this when they bought it about 16years ago.
Thanks
Oh, we were told by our neighboyurs that it was the local parish church - therefore Anglican.
The springs are all over the side of the hill, which itself is the great morain from a glacier that came to halt here at the end of ice age. Our house sits on one of the springs according to the local lore (we still have its original name "Brookside" in stained glass above the entrance door). When our back extension was built, the workmen came upon a cast iron pipe about half a metre in diameter, five feet underground, running downhill along the back passage . The Council have no record of the pipe. It is likely to be a drain pipe for one of the springs that was installed at the time the house was built - 1895.
I understood that St Saviours was fairly well attended but they needed a significant amount of work doing because of the spring which rises there grounds. They coudn't afford the work and decided to sell. (statement removed.)
I think there was supposed to be some community use of the Chantry - new hall building when the building was approved but it hasn't materialised.
The loss of the community hall is a real shame.
Correction: the vicarage is a couple of plots to the west of the mansion. Also, there is a clay pit marked where the Lido was and Sunshine Garden Centre is now.
I think the mansion was where Anderton Court is now - you can see on the map Alexandra Avenue on the other side of A.Park road, slightly further west than the mansion, which would fit. Bounded by the old brick wall to the left of the park path, as you say. And I understood that no. 268 APR was the vicarage?
As regards the churches - I had a look at Ken Gay's history, which says that St Saviours and St Andrews were built to serve the newly developed estates of houses, on land that used to belong to the company owning Alexandra Palace and Park. Gay says that the United Reformed church - now the 'Chantry' - was also built about the same time, to 'cater for the worshippers at the Whitfields Tabernacle in Finsbury who had moved to the new suburb'!
The 1873 map (only 30 years earlier) shows the whole area just consisting of fields - not a house to be seen except for Tottenham Wood Farmhouse (where Rhodes Avenue school is now) !
It is a most interesting map Alessandra. The church may have been very likely built on the grounds of the old mansion. Part of the structure would have covered the plot on which the vicarage now stands if the map is correct.
The only reminant of the mansion, I was told, is the old brick wall to the left of the park path that leads from Alexandra Park road up to the Palace, past the old deer enclosure.
Either a part of the mansion or the nearby banqueting house survived into the 1970s and was used for Council offices. Does anyone know more about it?
I seem to remember the church hall was burnt down - convenient for the developers!
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